I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before joining Forbes in February 2012, I had a very brief stint in corporate communications at HP (on purpose) and worked for more than six years on the tech team at Bloomberg News, where I dived into the financial side of tech. Before that, I was Silicon Valley bureau chief for Interactive Week, a contributor to Wired and Upside, and a reporter and news editor for MacWeek. The first computer game I ever played was Zork, my collection of now-vintage tech T-shirts includes a tie-dye BMUG classic and a HyperCard shirt featuring a dog and fire hydrant. When I can work at home, I settle into the black Herman Miller Aeron chair that I picked up when NeXT closed its doors. You can email me at cguglielmo@forbes.com.

AT&T's Big Call: Randall Stephenson On The iPhone, His Wireless Ambitions, And The Next Big Thing

Q: Did you think the iPhone was going to be revolutionary? I’m told you didn’t even see the iPhone before you signed the deal with Apple.

It was described — kind of like drawing a picture. But that was the bet we made — was that. I tell people you weren’t betting on a device, you were betting on Steve Jobs. In fact, that was the conversation in the boardroom with Cingular when we made this decision. There was a lot of conversation about whether we should do this.

You may not remember, but the first deal done with Apple was a radically different business deal than where we are today. It was a deal where Apple was going to have a very different rev share approach. So we had to get our head around whether we were prepared to change the business model. But we signed the deal and were getting close to launching. It’s early 2007 and, the first time I held this iPhone (laughs) — you looked at it. We’re building this 3G network at the time. We’d just begun. We’re saying mobility — data is going to move to the mobile world.

You get this device and you go, ‘This is it.’ Now I can begin to grasp where the mobility world can go with this kind of data device.

Apple and we had both envisioned this to be largely a WiFi device but with some wireless connectivity. But you looked at this, ‘You said, this is different.’ We’re in the process of just beginning to rebrand Cingular to AT&T. We’re going to take a while to do this. I laid down this gauntlet that we’re going to be a wireless company, and Stan Sigman (CEO of Cingular) was running our wireless business at the time and I remember calling Stan and talking to [our CMO Cathy Coughlin] and saying, “This device will not launch under the Cingular brand. This device is going to launch under the AT&T brand.” This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment to change how the public views AT&T as a wireless company, and to change internally how we view AT&T, a wireless company.”

I remember telling Stan, “I don’t care if you have to go to every store in America and get a paper bag and paint a globe on it and put it over the signage in each store. We’re going to launch this under the AT&T brand…We launched that thing under the AT&T brand. And it was the smartest thing we ever did because AT&T became synonymously branded with that Apple product at that moment in time.

Q: When did you know your bet on the iPhone was paying off, brandwise?

I knew that we were on the process of really making this transition because late that summer I went to India. Now think India. The AT&T brand is well known in India but it’s known as what? As an enterprise business, right. That’s what we do. Our brand is known to businesses in India and also probably as the old telephone business. Nobody in India thought of AT&T as a wireless company.

I go over there late summer. We’ve launched this iPhone, this brand new iconic device and it’s taken the world by storm. And when I get to India, everybody I meet…when they said, “The CEO of AT&T” – wanted to ask about the iPhone. That’s all they wanted to talk about. Now in India we’re a wireless company. I know we’re moving this thing. And so that was a very important moment to get the AT&T brand established as not the old telephone company, not an old enterprise business company but a wireless business, mobile business in the new world.

Q: When you looked at the iPhone, what was it that you saw?

The iPhone wasn’t the first device that would cause you to go, ‘Ah, this is unique. ‘ The iPhone recreated something that had been done probably two or three years before that first kind of caught my fancy.

What had been done two or three years before was the first Blackberry where they integrated a phone into it and all of your contacts. And Microsoft Outlook was closely integrated into the Blackberry. And I’ll never forget the first time…I got a Blackberry smartphone, and I’m playing with it and I’m going, this is really important because my email, my contacts, my calendar. Everything is here and it’s synced up with that computer. It’s synced up with my assistant’s computer.

I remember sitting down with my mom in Oklahoma City and showing her, “Watch mom.” And I put my mom’s contacts in and I told her that is now in my assistant’s computer back in the office. She said, ‘No it’s not.” We literally had a conversation and we talked through it. Then I said, “Now watch this, mom” and I clicked on her contact and it called my mom. It was just an Aha! moment.

We had a mobile phone that we carried to make voice calls with. We had a Blackberry we were carrying to do email with and we had a laptop if we really needed to create documents. And we were getting dangerously close to full integration of all that.

The iPhone, right off the bat, didn’t do much more than bring that same capability into a really sleek user interface, with a very elegant web browser and the app environment.

You start putting all this together. Here’s a really, really sleek integrated capability and you can begin to see where this goes in the data world. This is going to require a lot of bandwidth. It’s going to require a whole different experience from a wireless networking standpoint. But it was really exciting because it was taking what was a little bit clunky and making it into something very elegant that my mom – my 74-year-old mom is using an iPhone. That’s revolutionary.

This becomes a mass market, not just a business type device. It is mass market that everybody can now use. That’s when you say this can be big.

Q: You had troubles in the early days keeping up with the data use and you got a whole lot of negative publicity about that.

You’re talking about when the deluge of volume started hitting the network?

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Fantastic interview. Enjoyed the general insights of Mr. Stephenson along with the quick refresher of mobile history. As a shareholder, glad to hear about the company’s change in attitude towards development.